Military feats that will never be surpassed

I was just thinking today how unique WWII is when it comes to personal military feats. A combination of having a global world war that lasted 6 years and service personnel who continued fighting until they died or the war was over created the ripe conditions.

Here are a few feats that came to mind,


Erich Hartmann - 352 confirmed air to air victories.

Hans-Joachim Marseille - 17 air to air victories in one day.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel - 519 confirmed tank kills



Which others can you guys think of?

Eric 'Winkle' Brown. Flew more types than anyone else,a record that will probably never be beaten (487).

An incredible man indeed!

His wiki page is full of accolades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Brown_(pilot)

Number of dicks drawn on things: USMC.

I decided my post was counter to the spirit of the thread and to delete it.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming

i dont consider killing people a feature........
but to the topic ,anything science related like, going deepest in the ocean,jumping from highest on a parachute,going faster on land etc.

The topic is "Military feats that will never be surpassed". Defeating the enemy in war, even to the point of taking their lives, is the objective. Doing it in great numbers while at great risk to your own life is a "feat".

Two nations fielding over 1,000 bombers to attack their enemy on a fairly regular basis for almost two years.
The British at night and the Americans during the day.


Wheels

I’ve always been most impressed by the logistics of waging war over the long distances in the Pacific, one aspect in particular being the floating drydocks that could handle the largest ships and allow major repairs to be made in-theater instead of having to steam or be towed back to Pearl or San Diego.

Feature? When did I ever mention that word in my original post?

What facinates me about WWII is the sheer impact of how our world changed from '39-'45.

We went from wings with wires to jets. Rockets that could barely cross a football field to a 100 miles. Radar. Nuclear weapons. And that is just a tip of the iceburg

I'm fairly confident Rudel's claims for 519 tank kills has never been attained even once... let alone repeated.

(The 8th July 'swarm' of HS129 (not related to Rudel - but of a similar nature - claimed 40-50 killed tanks against 26GTB II TC. The daily loss for the whole of II TC was 8 T34 and 3 T70, with some of these being to the 4GTB - and this to both the air attacks and to determined fighting in the Soviet attacks and German counter attacks by tanks and infantry. It seems likely that around 4 tanks were killed from the air in this engagement (by approximately 60 aircraft)).

Claiming ratios of around 10:1 were also typical for Allied forces on the Western Front - and even today we see vast overclaiming for CS/Strike missions against vehicles (see the results of SEAD/DEAD and interdiction in Kosovo for how pitiful the return on effort can be).

Unified production of war materiel on the US home front was in my opinion the single greatest feat of the second world war

Dowding, Park, and the pilots British and foreign, whose foresight, planning and fortitude in the summer of 1940 preserved a platform to launch the eventual operation which rid the world of the dark shadow of Nazism.

"Unified production of war materiel on the US home front was in my opinion the single greatest feat of the second world war'

I came in to offer a similar example. I'm amazed at the fact that in 1944, just one year, the United States built over 100,000 airplanes. Over 8,000 a month! It's a staggering figure that never ceases to amaze me. Hell, over 18,000 b-24's alone were built during WW2.
Today, if a company gets an order for 200 airplanes, that's a pretty good account.

That's because each plane costs several million dollars or several tens of millions if we are talking about front line fighter jets. The economics of military hardware production today are vastly different from what it was during WWII. They really are two completely different paradigms.

+1

The entire scope of the War in the East (Germany and USSR): the size of the forces involved, the encirclements.

The cost and complexity of modern war makes such scales unlikely for anytime in the immediate future.

Absolutely. For example, in just 1941 alone the Soviets lost about 5 million soldiers (KIA, MIA, POW). That figure is incomprehensible by modern day standards.

For the final assault on Berlin, the Soviets had about 2.5 million soldiers. The Germans could only muster about 80,000 for the defense of the city.